Considered one of George Eliot's finest achievements, "The Mill on the Floss" is famed for its unsurpassed description of English rural life and for its striking, superbly drawn heroine, Maggie Tulliver. This novel's unsentimental evocation of childhood stands as an enduring triumph.

This edition of The Merchant of Venice, based on a fresh examination of the early editions, includes an exceptionally lucid and accessible introduction which addresses Shakespeare's attitude toward Semitism and establishes the cultural, historical, and literary context in which Shakespeare wrote the play. An interesting range of production photographs and drawings of Renaissance merchants and Jews, and a survey of the play's stage history ranging...

Published to great acclaim and fierce controversy in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment has left an indelible mark on global literature and our modern world, and is still known worldwide as the quintessential Russian novel. Readers of all backgrounds have debated its historical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions, probing the moral and ethical dilemmas that Dostoevsky so brilliantly stages throughout his narrative. Yet, at its heart, this...

A beautiful young woman stands poised over the gambling tables in an expensive hotel. She is aware of, and resents, the gaze of an unusual young man, a stranger, who seems to judge her, and finds her wanting. The stories of these two people will unfold separately and very differently, but the encounter will change her life. The strange young man is Daniel Deronda, brought up with his own origins shrouded in mystery, searching for a compelling outlet...

Details the story of Jude Fawley, a poor stonemason who longs to be a minister, and how the brutal deaths of his children and his inability to please the two women in his life hinder his dreams and threaten his existence.

Unique features include an extensive overview of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of Signet Classic Shakespeare series, plus a special introduction to the play by the editor Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University. It also contains text, notes, and commentaries printed in the clearest most readable type. Special introduction by Robert B. Heilman, University of Washington.

"Dutiful Newland Archer, an eligible young man from New York high society, is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a suitable match from a good family, when May's cousin, the beautiful and exotic Countess Ellen Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of perceived scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence. Her worldliness, disregard for society's...

This story of a proud rural beauty and the three men who court her is the novel that first made Thomas Hardy famous. Despite the violent ends of several of its major characters, Far from the Madding Crowd is the sunniest and least brooding of Hardy's great novels. The strong-minded Bathsheba Everdene-and the devoted shepherd, obsessed farmer, and dashing soldier who vie for her favor-move through a beautifully realized late nineteenth-century agrarian...

'The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb tide of memory, waves of emotion such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria—this is the material of this enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV
In the overture to Swann's Way, the themes of the whole of In Search of Lost Time are introduced, and the narrator's childhood in Paris and Combray is recalled, most memorably in...

"The Guermantes way" is the path that runs past the chateau belonging to the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes. It also represents the path into "the social kaleidoscope" traveled by Proust's narrator, which culminates in his introduction to the Paris salon of the Guermantes. The rich cast of characters in this third volume of In Search of Lost Time includes Robert de Saint-Loup, who is obsessed with the prostitute Rachel, and Baron...